Gu, once a well-known lawyer, was charged with “intentional homicide” in Neil Heywood’s death, the official Xinhua News Agency said today. An orderly in the family home, Zhang Xiaojun, was also charged, the report said.

“The facts are clear and the evidence is firm and adequate,” Xinhua said. Gu and her son had a financial conflict with Heywood, which led her to believe he was a threat to her son’s safety, Xinhua said.

The prosecution pushes forward the Chinese Communist Party’s case against Bo, whose ouster was the most serious upheaval in the country’s top ranks since Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang was purged in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

Bo was removed as Chongqing party secretary in March, and in April was suspended from the Politburo and accused of serious violations of Communist Party discipline after the allegations about his wife were revealed. He hasn’t been seen in public since the National People’s Congress in March.

Prosecutors interrogated Gu and Zhang, and “heard the opinions of the defense team,” Xinhua said. A trial will be held at at an undecided date, it said.

Gu’s alleged involvement in Heywood’s death was exposed after Bo’s former police chief in Chongqing, Wang Lijun, went to the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu in February bearing evidence she and Zhang had Heywood killed, according to U.S. officials briefed on the matter. Chinese investigators had initially told U.K. authorities that Heywood had died of alcohol poisoning.

Gu is the youngest of five daughters of a People’s Liberation Army general, according to a Chinese-language website affiliated with the Communist Youth League. She rose from a butcher’s assistant during the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution to become a lawyer who won a lawsuit in the U.S. and went on to write a book about the experience.

Bo’s family has become an embodiment of the political influence and wealth that can accrue to relatives of China’s top leaders. Gu’s sisters controlled a web of businesses from Beijing to Hong Kong to the Caribbean worth at least $126 million, regulatory and corporate filings show.

Bo Guagua, Gu and Bo’s son, fueled further speculation about the family’s wealth for attending Britain’s elite Harrow School and Oxford University, and then Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

Seeking to dispel claims that he lived an extravagant lifestyle, Bo Guagua sent a letter to Harvard’s Crimson newspaper in April saying that his education was funded partly by his mother’s “generosity from the savings she earned from her years as a successful lawyer and writer.”

Speaking at a briefing at the National Party Congress in March, Bo said his wife had quit her law practice and mostly did housework. “I am very moved of her sacrifice,” Bo said.

From the start, China’s leaders have sought to portray what it now calls the “Wang Lijun incident” and Bo’s ouster as aberrations and not symptoms of deeper problems within the Communist Party.

“The criminal case shall not be interpreted as a political struggle,” the Xinhua News Agency said in an April commentary. “China’s development will not be hindered by these separate incidents, and the overall state of the country will not be affected by human influence.”